“…we come astonishingly close to the mystical beliefs of Pythagoras and his followers who attempted to submit all of life to the sovereignty of numbers. Many of our psychologists, sociologists, economists and other latter-day cabalists will have numbers to tell them the truth or they will have nothing. Can you imagine, for example, a modem economist articulating truths about our standard of living by reciting a poem? Or by telling what happened to him during a late-night walk through East St. Louis? Or by offering a series of proverbs and parables, beginning with the saying about a rich man, a camel, and the eye of a needle? The first would be regarded as irrelevant, the second merely anecdotal, the last childish. […] We must remember that Galileo merely said that the language of nature is written in mathematics. He did not say everything is. And even the truth about nature need not be expressed in mathematics. For most of human history, the language of nature has been the language of myth and ritual. These forms, one might add, had the virtues of leaving nature unthreatened and of encouraging the belief that human beings are part of it. It hardly befits a people who stand ready to blow up the planet to praise themselves too vigorously for having found the true way to talk about nature.

agnotology / agnatology /ag-nə-TAHL-ə-jee/. noun. The study of cultural ignorance or doubt, particularly relating to scientific research and data. A recent coinage by Robert N. Proctor and Iain Boal combining Latin agnosia (ignorance) + ology (from Latin logy, the study of). See also misology (the fear or hatred of knowledge) and the earlier philosophical area of agnoiology. Thanks, Reader S.

“We need a political agnatology to complement our political epistemologies.” (Robert N. Proctor)

“Agnotology serves as a counterweight to traditional concerns for epistemology, refocusing questions about ”how we know“ to include questions about what we do not know, and why not. Ignorance is often not merely the absence of knowledge but an outcome of cultural and political struggle.” (Londa Schiebinger)

“Another element of agnotology consists in contending that the dismissal of science is supported by public opinion because people have a poor level of education and training.” (ed. Matthias Gross, Linsey McGoey)

The Forked Tongue Map is an interactive graphic that lets you explore—with graphics, video and text—59 endangered languages spoken in Queens, NY (in which there are an astonishing 500+ languages spoken in total).

Every Noise at Once is an “an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space.” In other words, a massive, interactive map of musical genres from opera to deep tech house…and seemingly everywhere else.

Today in 1616, Galileo Galilei is officially banned by the Roman Catholic Church from promoting, teaching or defending his heretical view that the Earth orbits the Sun. Officially, he is to “abstain completely from teaching or defending this doctrine and opinion or from discussing it… to abandon completely… the opinion that the sun stands still at the center of the world and the earth moves, and henceforth not to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatever, either orally or in writing.” Galileo didn’t relent and in 1633 was put on trial for heresy, threatened with torture and finally sentenced to indefinite house arrest, which he remained under until his death in 1642. Pope John Paul II officially “rehabilitated” Galileo in 1992. Fortunately, the Flat Earth Society is still fighting the good fight.